A passion for beetles

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Retired taxi driver Pierre Morvan from Brittany, in France, has, by studying beetles for four decades, earned himself international recognition. His insect collection contains more than 100,000 specimens gathered through numerous expeditions, chiefly in the Himalayas. Exploring terrain of little interest to professional scientists, Morvan has discovered over 600 new species. Now this determined collector is developing an entirely new method of classifying beetles.

Pierre Morvan has spent over 40 years collecting and studying beetles, undertaking many expeditions abroad, from the Himalayas to the Appalachians in the U.S.
©J.P. Pouteau/Fondation d'Auteuil

Batenus, Platynus, Carabus – Pierre Morvan has spent over 40 years studying these small insects – often black or brown but sometimes highly coloured – that rarely measure more than 5 to 8 millimetres from head to tip. He has collected over 100,000 beetles, as they are usually referred to (Coleoptera from the Carabidae family), painstakingly labelling and storing them in his house in Redon, a small town in southern Brittany.

Morvan’s collection is the result of numerous expeditions to many regions: the mountains of Iran and the Caucasus, the Himalayas – Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet and China – and the Appalachians in the United States. His favourite region is the Himalayas, whose deep valleys and high ridges he first dreamed of exploring when he was seven years old. At about the same time, he also developed a passionate interest in insects. Entomology is what has attracted him to all the mountain regions he has explored since 1967.

During the expeditions, an estimated 600 to 700 new species of beetles have been discovered by Morvan, who stopped counting long ago. He has come up with five new genera and even a sub-family – a remarkable achievement for a non-professional who for many years as a taxi driver in Paris carried out research in his spare time.

Many new species of beetles have been discovered by Pierre Morvan.
©J.P. Pouteau/Fondation d'Auteuil

Signing his many scientific articles and publications with his name in Breton, Brittany’s ancient Celtic language, “dremm mab Morvan” is self-taught and conducts his research independently of academic institutions. “The Rolex Award I won in 1987 is the only certificate I’ve ever earned,” he says with a chuckle. Now 73 years old, he has paid for his own expeditions, and the 50,000 Swiss francs from his 1987 Rolex Award is the only outside funding he has ever received. With that money and proceeds from the sale of his taxi, he was able to stop his regular work in 1989. He has dedicated himself full time to his passion for beetles ever since.

But long before that change in his life, Morvan’s work had won him recognition in scientific circles. The Natural History Museum of Paris had invited him to join its research team. “But the contract stipulated that I would have to shift the focus of my research to Africa,” he recalls, “where large insect collections were formed during France’s colonial past. I couldn’t imagine giving up the Himalayas.”

One of the many obstacles he has faced over the years is difficulty in obtaining access to specialized libraries and to collections of Coleoptera housed in museums. “You have to be able to make comparisons,” he explains, “in order to establish whether the specimens you’ve found have already been described or whether they are a new species.”

His status as an independent researcher nevertheless gives him certain liberties that suit his pioneering spirit. In 1971, for example, he set out for the Himalayas, turning a deaf ear to the advice of specialists from the Natural History Museum, who claimed that the region held no interest for the study of Carabidae. The passage of time has proved him right: in 40 years, the number of known species of Himalayan beetles has risen from 20 to over 5,000. And many other entomologists have joined him in the field.

Morvan’s expeditions were not free of danger and he never knew whether he would find beetles or something far more menacing in damp spots at the base of trees or under fallen trunks. Once in Asia, for example, he found himself face-to-face with a king cobra and some deadly millipedes.

But it was in the Appalachians that he got his biggest fright. “I was turning over the stump of a tree when I flushed out a rattlesnake. It rose up in front of me, its head inches from my stomach, its tail rattling. In spite of the shock, I kept my cool and held the heavy stump at arm’s length. Then I slowly lowered it back down before carefully backing away.” Morvan was far from the nearest house and had no means of communication, so a bite could have been fatal.

Since his last expedition in 1999, Pierre Morvan has concentrated on examining the specimens in his vast collection. Using a binocular loupe, he observes, compares, sorts, classifies and dissects the beetles. “With insects, it’s the details that matter, and a tiny detail often makes all the difference,” he says. For the past 10 years, he has focused on the female’s sperm pouch, a tiny organ in which she can stock the male’s sperm for months and even years, fertilizing her eggs when the time is right. Morvan is developing a species identification key based on the interesting variations he has observed in sperm pouches. He hopes to use these similarities and differences to establish a new classification system that will make it possible to determine the relationship between species.

This small revolution in the making will, however, have to be accepted by the scientific community before museums are required to change the thousands of labels in their collections, bringing them in line with a new nomenclature.

The importance of amateur entomologists is proven thanks to Morvan and others like him. Museums owe up to 90 per cent of their collections of butterflies and Coleoptera to amateur interest in the most spectacular groups of insects.

Not all amateurs are quite so prolific – or patriotic – as dremm mab Morvan, however, who founded Loened Aziad, the first journal of entomology in Brittany. And when Morvan publishes descriptions of new species, he takes great pleasure in giving them names reminiscent of Brittany. Carabus alanstivelli, for example, was named after Alan Stivell, a well-known musician who was instrumental in the resurgence of Breton music. Morvan’s choice is hardly surprising: he plays the bombarde – a wind instrument – in Bagad Nominoë, Redon’s folk music group. It seems beetlemania is not the only consuming passion of this irrepressible and proud native of Brittany.

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With insects, it's the details that matter, and a tiny detail often makes all the difference.”

A passion for beetles

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